WyBlog

I'm an 8-track guy in an iPod world

I feel like an idiot. Sophie got an iPod for Christmas. It took me most of today to figure out how to copy a cd onto it. She wanted to listen to her Hannah Montana music on her new iPod. The instructions that came with it said to install iTunes. OK fine, but it wants me to install Quicktime too.

I loathe Quicktime. I installed it on a previous PC and regretted the decision almost immediately. It commandeered every known kind of audio, video, and picture file. Double-clicking anything brought up Quicktime instead of the app I really wanted. I had to reinstall a ton of stuff just to get back to the functionality I had before Quicktime showed up. Plus, it has this annoying habit of constantly popping up with "updates are available" nag screens. Frankly, I don't care if Apple Software Update wants to install iFrozzbot V99.2.

So with trepidation I downloaded and installed iTunes. The iPod configuration screen came up and I immediately noticed that it wanted iTunes to manage all the media on my PC. Uh oh. It said iTunes will rename and reorganize all my music and video files. Are they kidding me? Is this a music player or a way of life? Fortunately there was a "don't do that" button I could check. It said that I'd have to manage my music files on my own. Which come to think of it, is probably why I had so much trouble copying her CDs to the iPod.

Then it went to the iTunes Store registration page. An email address and credit card number are needed. You can't use your iPod until you enter a valid email address. WTF? Sophie is 7. She "emails" using Webkinz chat. She does not have her own email address. So I created an account for me.

Meanwhile behind the scenes iTunes had been merrily canvassing my PC looking for .wav files. It found all the odd sound effects I had downloaded eons ago like the Star Trek Outlook notification I use. It wanted to sync those files with her iPod. Why? Can't I just pick what to download into it? Apparently not, it's all or nothing. So out of the starting gate her iPod is cluttered with a few hundred useless files. (OK, later on I figured out I could delete them from the iPod. Woo Hoo!)

Next I got her Hannah Montana CDs and put one into the PC. iTunes asked if I wanted to import it into my media library. Sure! Curiously it does not appear to actually read the tracks off the CD; it reads some kind of code from the CD and downloads the songs from the internet. How do I know this? Because one of her CDs is from a two disk set. Both disks appeared to iTunes as having the same songs (the songs on CD #1). No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it to recognize what songs were really on CD #2. Microsoft Media Player would let me listen to the songs from the CD, so I know they were there. But iTunes insisted I had another copy of CD #1 in there.

I deleted the album it had created from CD #1 and tried again. This time it popped up a box saying there were 2 different CDs with this title on file, and asked which one I wanted. I chose the second one from the drop down list and even though CD #1 was in the PC, iTunes said it was loading the songs from CD #2! Is it really this hard, or am I just a boob?

Having jumped that hurdle I went to resync the iTunes library with her iPod. But the Hannah Montana songs did not copy over. Now what did I do wrong? Turns out I didn't add them to the iPod playlist first. iPod playlist, where did that come from? I didn't add all that other crap to the iPod playlist and it showed up on the iPod!

In any event the playlist thing did the trick and Sophie was finally rocking out to Hannah Montana on her new iPod. We even went for more potential trouble and tried to buy some music from the iTunes Store. Amazingly those songs synced up with the iPod automatically; I guess Apple figures that if you buy a song from them you want it on your iPod.

Sophie's happy now. Me? I feel like I an update to WyBrain. Or that I should simply embrace my new iOverlords.

Posted at 16:29 by Chris Wysocki   []   Comments | Archived | Perm Link |   |   Tweet